GOULBURN Mulwaree Council general manager Warwick Bennett has urged a court to take a tough stance against proponents of an Islamic Cemetery.
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In a statement released on Monday, Mr Bennett hit out at the Al Mabarrat Benevolent Society for allegedly not supplying required information to the NSW Land and Environment Court by last Friday.
He accused the applicants of having “no respect” for the community, Council or the court process, a claim the Society rejects.
“...The Al Mabarrat Benevolent Society has failed yet again to supply the required information for the Marulan cemetery to be assessed appropriately,” Mr Bennett said.
The parties are at loggerheads in the court over the Society’s proposed 10,000-plot Islamic Cemetery off Highland Way at Marulan.
The proponents have taken Council to court over what they claimed was “deemed refusal” of the project.
On June 17 the court instructed the Society to supply a plan of management of the proposed site, information on traffic, the impact the development would have on vegetation, flora and fauna and the suitability of the soils for burial plots.
"...The Al Mabarrat Benevolent Society has failed yet again to supply the required information for the Marulan cemetery to be assessed appropriately.”
- Warwick Bennett
The Council has also required the Muslim community to clarify why there was limited capacity in Sydney cemeteries before developing a further facility at Marulan.
“This refusal to supply information as directed by the Court is just a continuation of Al Mabarrat Benevolent Society’s history of refusing to supply information,” Mr Bennett said.
“From December 2014 to March 2015 Council constantly wrote to the proponents of this cemetery seeking further information which they failed to supply and then they had the audacity to claim that Council refused to determine the application.
“The Court now agrees with Council that they have not supplied sufficient information. Now (the) Society has ignored the Court instructions.”
He pointed out that Council refused the DA in 2014 due to a lack of information.
“This Council and our community can no longer have any respect for this organisation or cannot trust the organisation going forward to do what it says it will do if it will not even follow the directions of the Land & Environment Court,” Mr Bennett said.
He believed it was now doubtful that the Friday, August 7 conciliation conference would proceed.
Information Submitted
BUT the Society’s planning consultant Richard Smyth sees no impediment to it going ahead. He told the Post he had supplied most of the outstanding information via email to his solicitors on Friday, the due date, and more on Saturday.
This was passed onto Council’s solicitors on Monday.
Mr Smyth said only minor details on an Aboriginal heritage impact study still had to be tidied up.
“We have supplied everything we had to and more,” he said.
“The council received the material in plenty of time and it was delivered the same day that Mr Bennett put out his press release.
“Maybe he wasn’t aware of it or the communication has let him down.”
Mr Smyth argued it might have been a day or two late but the weekend made little difference.
He described Mr Bennett’s language as “over the top.”
He said the information supplied included the plan of management, traffic information, flora and fauna impact and suitability of soils for burial plots. But he claimed if Council had read the original information “properly,” it wouldn’t have requested most of it.
Mr Smyth supplied a copy of a December, 2014 engineers report concluding that the plots’ setbacks to dams, watercourses, field drains, groundwater and property boundaries “were more than adequate to protect downstream and adjoining property users and land use activities.”
He said the need for the cemetery at Marulan was not part of the court contentions. Regardless, he maintained while there were two or three Islamic cemeteries in western Sydney, Rookwood’s life was “limited.”
“We are not refusing to supply information, that’s for sure,” he said.
“The Al Mabarrat Society is keen to get approval and I’ve been asked to supply information as promptly as possible.”